Cipher

Hello everyone! Today we are releasing the Beta Account Center. This new part of our website will allow you to activate and manage your own Beta account (rather than waiting on us to sync the database), as well as copy characters over from the live servers. The Beta Account Center can be found here and through the navigation bar at the top of the site, under Account Center. Specifically, this is what the new system will let you do: Create a Beta account if you don't have one already. This is done for you automagically when you visit the page for the first time! Synchronize your account information to match your live account. This does not include your characters, but does update your password. You can do this once every 20 minutes. You will not be able to access the Beta Account Center to copy characters while your account is being synchronized. Queue to copy characters from any live shard to beta. You can queue 1 character copy every 20 minutes (subject to change based on load). You are able to copy over any character that is above level 1. We highly recommend logging a character off before initiating a copy. - this will ensure that the copied character is up to date. You can copy the same character over more than once, but only if that character is not already in queue. So what's all this about a queue? Well, because of the load that we are anticipating before our stress test on Saturday, all character copies and synchronize requests are put into a queue. You will be able to see the characters that are queued up for copy on the homepage of the Beta Account Center though the estimated completion time will probably become somewhat inaccurate as the server load increases. Please use this thread to provide feedback and report bugs for the Beta Account Center. We look forward to any feedback that you all have on the new account system and hope to see you all at the stress test on Saturday.

Announcement Here This thread is for providing feedback and reporting bugs for the new Beta Account Center. Thanks!

Hey everyone! I hope you all have enjoyed the winter event so far! If you still need any badges then make sure you get them before next Tuesday (the 31st) as this is when the event will be ending. Our legal fees this month are quite small and we do not have any additional expenses in January, so this month’s donation target will be more in line with where we were before. We have added a Google Voice line to our G-Suite account to have as our dedicated / registered phone number - this will be an additional $10 per month going forward. December 2019 Last month we accepted $9203.16 in donations - $46.43 over our target for the month. The new Google Voice line cost us $7.24 through to January 1st but will be $10/mo going forward. Additionally, the two 1&1 IONOS charges that got cancelled in November charged us early in December, increasing our bill with them for December by $20. Here is the breakdown of what the December funds went towards: $4,820.39 to OVH for our hosting $3,607.05 to our lawyers for their services rendered from Sept. 30th to Nov. 8th $96.00 for our Google G-Suite Business account $75.00 to renew our Invision Community license $50.00 for our 1&1 IONOS domain & outbound email services This includes the two domain fees that got moved back from November $10.00 for our Atlassian Jira Cloud instance (10-user) $8.34 for security / administration software $7.24 for our Google Voice line through January 1st January 2020 We received an invoice from our lawyers for their services rendered in November totalling $148.20; this will be paid in early January. We do not have any additional expenses in January and we have $20.70 overrun from December which will be applied towards the donation target for this month. In total, the donation target for January 2020 is $5,102.69. Here is a breakdown of how the funds are allocated: $4,820.39 to OVH for our hosting $148.20 to our lawyers for their services rendered since Nov. 9th $106.00 for our Google G-Suite Business account This includes the new $10/mo cost for the Voice line $30.00 to 1&1 IONOS for domain services & outgoing email $10.00 for our Atlassian Jira Cloud instance (10-user) $8.80 for the security / administration software We have met our donation goal for January. Thank you for your support! Our donation system will be open as of the time of this post with a donation target of $5,102.69 and will automatically close once that target is met. The past 8 months has been incredible and we’re really excited to see what 2020 has in store. We hope everyone enjoyed the Holidays and has a great New Years; just remember to stay safe! - The Homecoming Team

Merry Christmas! 🙂

Hey everyone! Winter is upon us and so too is the Winter event! In case you haven’t read the patch notes or seen it in-game for yourself yet - snow has covered Atlas Park, presents have been scattered throughout our beloved city, and the Winter Horde have arrived! You can read more about it here. As per tradition on the last Saturday of each month, it’s time to go over our finances and donations over the past month and the upcoming month. November 2019 Breakdown Last month we accepted $9,071.36 in donations - $36.06 over our target for the month. We had some additional charges in the past month which includes a 1-year DocuSign subscription which will allow us to handle more of our legal documentation ourselves (reducing our legal costs going forward) and a new business address from UPS to act as our primary business address. Here is the exact breakdown of what the October funds went towards: $4,820.39 to OVH for our hosting + $9.97 to sync the billing for the new A-1 purchased in October $4,251.75 to our lawyers for their services rendered up to Sept. 30th $240.00 for a 1-year DocuSign subscription $157.00 for our new business address from UPS (6-month renewal term with setup fee) $137.76 for some domains (used for our new legal documentation) $96.00 for our Google G-Suite Business account $30.00 for our 1&1 IONOS domain & outbound email services $10.00 for our Atlassian Jira Cloud instance (10-user) $8.80 for security / administration software Up $1.85 from previous months December 2019 We have received the next invoice from our lawyers totaling $3,607.05 which will be paid in early December. We will be including an additional $509.49 this month refill the contingency fund from the additional one-off expenses in November (DocuSign, domains, and UPS). Our monthly (recurring) operating costs have increased by $1.85 as cost for the security / administration software previously mentioned increased slightly. Otherwise, our other monthly (recurring) operating costs have not increased since October. In total, the donation target for December 2019 is $9,156.73. Here is a breakdown of how the funds are allocated: $4,820.39 to OVH for our hosting $3,607.05 to our lawyers for their services rendered from Sept. 30th $509.49 to cover the one-off expenses in November (DocuSign, domains, and UPS) $96.00 for our Google G-Suite Business account $75.00 for our Invision Community renewal (6-month) $30.00 to 1&1 IONOS for domain services & outgoing email We’re hoping to eliminate this after December $10.00 for our Atlassian Jira Cloud instance (10-user) $8.80 for the security / administration software Our donation goal has been met. Thank you for your support! The next donation window will open at the end of December. Our donation system will be open as of the time of this post with a donation target of $9,156.73 and will automatically close once that target is met. Thank you for your continued support; 2019 has been an amazing year and we couldn’t be happier to have our City and community back. We hope everyone had an awesome Thanksgiving and enjoys the Winter festivities. If you’re traveling for the holidays then please be safe! - The Homecoming Team

I would be happy to create an endpoint for 3rd party developers to fetch the stats presented on our Server Status page without having to rely on scraping. I have a few things to do that take priority at the moment, but I can probably get something to you tonight 🙂

We're actually already looking into expanding the colour system in the character creator. I have a short post about it here:

Enabling or disabling the view of auras is a good idea and definitely something that we'll look into 🙂

The current way I have it mapped out (and prototyped) is as follows: The existing palette remains but is moved into a sort of tabbed view that goes between that palette and the new colour picker The new colour picker as the following: An HSL colour square that you can use to pick colours R/G/B input (with text entry and sliders) H/S/L input (with text entry and sliders) A smaller palette of colours that are in use in the costume already (so that you can easily use a colour on multiple pieces by selecting it again) The HSL square / picker looks something like this: I could add a way to just enter / paste colours in hexidecimal (RRGGBB) form as well, though with the other inputs in place it may or may not be worth the UI clutter.

Hey everyone! Quick reminder that we have a have a traditional Halloween themed costume contest happening today at 9pm UTC (10pm BST, 5pm EST, 2pm PST) in Kallisti Wharf on all of our shards. You can read more information about here. As usual on the last Saturday of the month, it’s time to talk Finances and Donations again today. This month will be have the highest donation target yet as we have received the invoice from our lawyers for the services rendered up to September 30th. Our monthly operating expenses have moved up to $4,963.34 after the addition of a new Advance-1 server (you can read about that in our last Donations & Finances post) and additional security software that we would prefer not to name as a precaution. October Breakdown Last month we accepted $5,951.61 in donations - $234.73 over our original target for the month. Unfortunately, OVH introduced a $57.99 setup fee in the time between pricing out the new A-1 server and us purchasing it; this amount came out of the overrun for the month. With the addition of the aforementioned service we were left with $179.79 overrun this past month; this amount will be put towards the expenses for the month of November. All of that said, here’s what the funds from the October donation window went towards: $4,878.38 to OVH for our hosting costs This includes the additional $102.99 + $57.99 for the new A-1 server $1,326.04 to our lawyers for their services up to early October $96.00 to Google for our G-Suite Business account $30.00 to 1&1 IONOS for domain and outbound (server) email This went down $10 from the previous month $10.00 to Atlassian for Jira Cloud (10-user) $6.95 to pay for the aforementioned new security software As usual, here's a screenshot of all of our outgoing payments in October. Note that the first bank transfer failed (PayPal is lovely), but the second one did go through. This bank withdraw was to pay our lawyers via wire transfer. Finally, the $6.95 has been redacted for security - that is the aforementioned new security software which has a recurring fee. November Breakdown As previously mentioned, we have received the invoice totalling $4,251.75 from our lawyers for most of their services rendered to date; this amount will be included in the total for November’s donation target. As mentioned in our September and October posts, we will not be showing the invoices from our lawyers to protect the identities of the law firm and anyone else who may be mentioned on the invoice This month our lawyers have been providing further advice to forward our goal of becoming a legitimate operation. As part of this we’ve also been re-writing our User Agreement and Privacy Policy, which makes up the bulk of the additional cost this round. After the addition of the new Advance-1 server in October and the aforementioned service introduced last month, our new recurring (monthly) expenses total up to $4,963.34. After adding the total from the invoice from our lawyers and subtracting the overrun from October, the donation target for the month of November comes to $9,035.30. Here is a breakdown of how the funds are allocated: $4,820.39 to OVH for our recurring hosting costs $4,251.75 to our lawyers for their services rendered up to Sept. 30th $96.00 to Google for our G-Suite Business account $30.00 to 1&1 IONOS for domain and outbound (server) email $10.00 to Atlassian for Jira Cloud (10-user) $6.95 to pay for the aforementioned new security software Our donation system will be open as of the time of this post with a donation target of $9,035.30 and will automatically close once that target is met. Thank you for all of the support as always; this is truly an amazing community and we wouldn’t be here without your incredible support. I hope you have enjoyed the Halloween festivities and we look forward to seeing your amazing costumes in our Costume Contest later today! Thank you again for your continued support! - The Homecoming Team

Heya, you can use the Game Account page (https://forums.homecomingservers.com/gameaccount/) to change your in-game password. I've also moved this to our Help & Support section.

Heya, just a quick update to let you know that we've resolved the issues with the site. If you run into any more problems then feel free to let us know again in this thread. Thanks!

We're currently working on fixing this; thank you for the report :)

Rodriguez Jr. - Lila

This is awesome! Now I have to go revive my 3d printer and make one 😛

I have too many favourites! I might just have to start posting one song per day 😛 I'll have to start this off with Jan Blomqvist's "Maybe Not", the music video is a bit out there but the music is unique and I quite like it.

Yep, that is exactly correct. When you add a manifest to any of the launchers (including Sweet Tea), you are trusting the author of that manifest. The author of the manifest can, at any point in time, upload a virus to the manifest and let it run that instead of the client. That virus could then do whatever it wants, unconfined to the rules of the launcher that executed it. In either case and with any of the launchers, you are still required to have full trust in the author of any manifests you add to it, because at the end of the day if they want to exploit your system, they're going to be able to do so.

Yes, when we state that something will be expensive we mean in terms of time and/or influence.

That's quite odd lol, I've sent a request to have that actual business' information updated (pending review). ( In case you're unaware, our host is the actual OVH @ https://www.ovh.com/ca/en/ 🙂 )

Hey everyone, I hope you’re all enjoying the stuff on Pineapple (for those unaware, we’ve released a new patch on our test server, dubbed Pineapple, check out the patch notes here). It's time to talk finances again. There are two additional recurring charges this month; as mentioned last month, we have engaged a law firm (more details below), and the first invoice from them has come through. Additionally, we will be purchasing one more Advance-1 server to act as a security appliance after a recent incident within the wider community. -- September Breakdown Last month we accepted $3,695.82 in donations - $585.55 over our target for September. After our 1&1 bill increased by $10 this month, we were left with $575.55 in overrun which will be put towards our expenses for the month of October. Here’s what the funds from the September donation window went towards: $4,717.40 to OVH for our recurring hosting costs $96.00 to Google for our G-Suite Business account $40.00 ($10 higher than last month) to 1&1 IONOS for domain and outbound (server) email services $10.00 to Atlassian for Jira Cloud (10-user) Here is a screenshot of our payments / expenses since the last donation window: -- October Breakdown As previously mentioned, we have added one additional server (an Advance-1 w/ 1gb vRack upgrade) to act as an additional security appliance for our network. This will be an additional recurring cost of $102.99, bringing our new monthly total to $4,966.39. Here is a new breakdown of our recurring (monthly) expenses: $4,820.39 to OVH for hosting expenses Up $102.99 from previous months due to the new A1 $96.00 to Google for our G-Suite Business account $40.00 to 1&1 IONOS for our domain and outbound (server) email services $10.00 to Atlassian for Jira Cloud (10-user) As mentioned last month, we have engaged a law firm to assist us with the necessary legal work that’s required as we work towards our goal of creating a stable, long-term server for the community. They will primarily be working on new versions of our public legal documentation (Privacy Policy, User Agreement, etc) as well as providing legal advice in various other areas. Expect us to have additional legal fees each month moving forward. The first invoice from them totaled $1,326.04. As stated in our September donation post, we cannot provide a screenshot of this invoice as it contains a large amount of personal information for many of our team members (to the point that the entire invoice would have to be redacted). -- After applying the $575.55 overrun from September to October’s expenses, we’re left with a donation target of $5,716.88. As of the time of this post, our donation system will be open. As in previous months, once the donation target is met the donation system will automatically close. Thank you for all of the support! We’ve now hit our fundraising target for the month of October and donations are now closed. Thank you yet again for the continued support!

Another 7 accounts have been permanently banned.. Wonder how many times it'll take for them to give up? 😛

Hey all, Today we issued a ban wave to a number of accounts involved in RWT (Real World Trading - the act of exchanging real money for in-game goods and services). This is explicitly against the Code of Conduct: All accounts caught selling have been permanently banned, with no possibility of appeal. All accounts caught buying have been suspended for 2 weeks and had all influence removed from them. A total of 54 accounts have been actioned as part of this ban wave, with over 20 billion influence deleted. We are now fully capable of tracking down RWT activity going forwards, so we would advise you do not partake in such activities if you wish to continue playing on Homecoming. - The Homecoming Team

Try relogging your character, that should fix it.

The manifest server is back online. Thank you for your patience 🙂

While we certainly appreciate you looking out for the community, we're definitely covered on finances thanks to the amazing community and their donations. That said, placing ads on the website is not something that we'll be doing.